


one thousand cranes

by hoosierbitch



Category: White Collar
Genre: Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Origami, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-20
Updated: 2011-03-20
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:15:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/pseuds/hoosierbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> Neal is dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one thousand cranes

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [](http://usakeh.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://usakeh.livejournal.com/)**usakeh** , who made a very generous donation at a charity auction a very long time ago (thank you for your patience!). This is a death!fic written by someone who avoids reading them. I did my best to bring as much reality and poetry to the subject as I could, and I hope that it comes across as honestly as intended.
> 
> Amazing podfic available, courtesy of [lullabyforahelix (sapphire2309)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire2309/pseuds/lullabyforahelix), link in the endnotes. If you listen, please make sure to go back and leave them feedback!

He leaves the opened envelope on the table for weeks.

He walks around the apartment and eats his breakfast and goes to work and comes home and it’s still there. The letter’s plain and white but the truth of it is not in the envelope. It’s in the colds he’s been catching and the fatigue that’s been plaguing him, the inexplicable chills and the flu that hung around too long. The truth of it is in his body, in his blood, in black ink on white paper.

*

  
“I’m dying.” He’s thrown the envelope away but he couldn’t figure out how to dispose of the papers that were inside. He’s cold. He spent the evening on the porch with a box of matches but eventually decided that burning the results wouldn’t change them. It wouldn’t be cathartic. It would just leave him with a pile of ashes. Now he has the folded pages in one hand and his cell phone in the other, like blind justice with her scales.

"Why, what did I do this time? Did you find the devilled ham that I spilled on your suit? Because I'll pay for the dry cleaning, but I won't apologize. You're too finicky for your own good."

Neal would like to agree with Peter. He'd like to say that he was just exaggerating his hurt because Peter had dripped a sandwich on a pair of his pants, and _that’s_ why he called. He'd like to be holding a dry cleaner's bill instead of a death sentence. If there were parallel universes, then in one of them, in one of them he'd like to be having a different conversation. He'd like to be joking. He'd like to not be dying.

"Peter," _I'm serious, I'm sick, please wish these words this letter this fatigue away with me_. He tries to force the words out: _the results of my blood test came back._ He doesn’t want to have to say that they came back _positive_ because the word’s too ambiguous. They need a new word for it, he wants to tell Peter, they need a new word for positive that also means doomed.

"I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

*

  
The doctors tell him how long he has. _Years_. He can count them on his fingers. Does count them, _one two three maybe four_ , _pinky ring middle and if he’s lucky pointer_ , there is poisoned blood pulsing through his veins.

"I think I'm cursed with fours," he laments to Peter. "And it's such an ugly number, too." Squat, square, four.

He'd have preferred three. As a number, that is, as a concept, not - not in years. Stability of a tripod. A prime number. He's already led a life full of triangles.

"You're not cursed," Peter says, fiercely. Neal knows he's got to give Peter time to adjust. He’d picked up a pamphlet about coping while they were waiting in the lobby, and it had listed the stages of grief that his loved ones _twos, threes, four_ would endure.

"I’m just unlucky, then, I guess."

"You're not," Peter says, and Neal has to look away then because he starts to cry.

_You're supposed to get what you deserve_.

*

  
He takes a medical leave from the FBI for a couple of weeks. Sits in the penthouse and stares at his ankle.

Peter wants him to press charges. Open an investigation, find the guilty parties and punish them. Bring patient zero to justice. _What are you going to do?_ Neal wanted to know. _Put him in prison? Again?_

Peter wants revenge.

Neal thinks it's sweet, in a way. That Peter cares so much and so angrily. He also thinks that prison reform is one windmill he'd rather not tilt at. Not now, not when he's learning how to count his days like precious stones, learning to regard his energy as a finite quantity.

June wants him to run away. Wants him to cut off the anklet and get on a plane and travel the world.

She gave him a plane ticket and an old journal when he told her. Dried flowers mark the page where Byron had written about what he was going to do when he got released from prison. Neal had started to read the rest of the notebook but stopped when it began to jog unpleasant memories in the locked corridors of his mind. Byron had talked about the places he'd visit, the landmarks he'd see, the paintings he'd view. Eiffel Tower and the Sistine Chapel, the mountains in Wales and the Great Wall of China.

“We've got the internet now,” he tells June with a laugh. “We don't need to travel anymore.”

Peter wants him to fight and June wants him to leave and he's pretty sure Elizabeth wants him to leave, too.

They both know how it's going to destroy Peter when he dies.

Soon all that Neal’s going to have is what he leaves to other people. And he – he wants –

He cuts his leave short and goes back to work. Peter asks him why and all he says is that he’s got nothing better to do.

There is nothing better than what he’s doing. Working, protecting people, protecting lives and livelihoods. _Making a difference_.

*

  
When he becomes too sick to go to work June and Moz take care of him. Moz controls his meds with all the paranoia of a man too familiar with the medical system, and June slips him extra painkillers because it’s hard to watch someone you love die painfully. She gives him oxycodone and cooks him dinner and dances with him when he feels butterfly fragile and brittle. When he can no longer dance, Moz is there to help him walk.

*

  
He’s relearned his body in numbers. Number of months left, cell counts, the list of lesions that appear on his skin.

When the end approaches he is given another number. _One thousand._

Over the past months, as he got too sick to hide what was happening, people from his past sent him letters and made phone calls, sent condolences and platitudes.

Alex gave him one thousand paper cranes, strung together in a bunch above his bed.

The legend goes that whoever folds one thousand paper cranes can make a wish, and that wish will come true. Health or long life, good fortune or wealth.

The paper is expensive and beautiful. The strings of cranes on the outside are a light, brilliant blue. The strands on the inside are darker, deeper, richer. The collection of cranes above his head looks like Kate’s eyes and smells like Alex’s perfume and represents a wish that can’t come true.

*

  
“It hurts,” he cries, when the pain that had been germinating in his legs begins to sear through his calves and up his thighs. “It hurts,” he cries, and then the pain gets worse. And when the pain blinds his words he just screams, just sound, wet choking screams because his body is a forest and the illness is burning his muscles for fuel, his illness is growing and the medicine is slowing but not stopping his demise.

He screams and he knows that he’s wet himself, knows that his bladder got caught up in the spasms that are wrecking him, knows that the wasteland that had been his body is no longer under his control.

As time passes the pain grows and grows, his body shrinks and shrivels, and he keeps losing things. Dignity, independence, pride, health.

_Words._

Hope.

*

  
And when the end comes, he is not ready.

When the end comes he's still young and unfinished and guilty, he's still got debts to repay and sins to be forgiven for, he's not – he is not ready.

His flesh fails him. His mind is bruised and drugged and tired but still awake. Still trapped in the corroding prison of his body.

And when the end comes, he has one thousand paper cranes and two close friends and almost thirty-seven years, almost, almost thirty-seven.

"We're going to miss you," El whispers. He almost says _I'm going to miss you, too._ He waits to laugh at his own foolishness until she leaves. He laughs because it is uglier than crying, and he has not been beautiful for months.

Soon Peter comes in and sits next to the bed. Puts his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He's aged. Neal's aged him. "I'm sorry," Neal says. And his throat's raw from the tubes they've had to put into him and his voice is rough with tears he's fighting to hold back and his heart, the heavy place behind his ribs that hurts when he breathes, his heart is breaking. "I don't want to leave you," he whispers. _I don't want you to have to miss me._

And Peter sobs. Just once. "Don't," Peter says.

"I tried, Peter. I fought. For you, I tried... "

"Don't apologize," Peter interrupts. "Don't you dare."

He looks at Peter's face – so loved, so familiar, so handsome. Wet with tears and creased with grief. He can't bring himself to say _I love you_ but when he reaches for Peter's hand, when Peter's hand wraps around his emaciated fingers, when Peter holds on tight even though it hurts, he thinks that Peter understands.

And when the end comes

*

  
  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] one thousand cranes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12047856) by [lullabyforahelix (sapphire2309)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire2309/pseuds/lullabyforahelix)




End file.
